Crossed Threads
The silken threads by viewless spinners spun,
Which float so idly on the summer air,
And help to make each summer morning fair,
Shining like silver in the summer sun,
Are caught by wayward breezes, one by one,
Are blown to east and west and fastened there,
Weaving on all the roads their sudden snare.
No sign which road doth safest, freest run,
The wingèd insects know, that soar so gay
To meet their death upon each summer day.
How dare we any human deed arraign;
Attempt to recon any moment’s cost;
Or any pathway trust as safe and plain
Because we see not where the threads have crossed?
Helen Hunt Jackson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830, a near contemporary and sometime classmate of Emily Dickinson. Jackson saw the value of Dickinson’s poetry, and later wrote to her urging her towards publication, but theirs wasn’t a literary relationship. Jackson turned to poetry and other forms of literary expression in the aftermath of personal tragedy, the death of her first husband in 1863 and the illness and deaths of their two children. She would go on to write essays and fiction and to become, in her writing and campaigning, a passionate advocate for Native American rights. She died in 1885, a year before Emily Dickinson.
Crossed Threads is skilfully constructed in the sonnet form Jackson often favoured. The focus of her observation – insect webs – might seem a conventional one, but it’s interesting that the portrait of a summer morning has been narrowed down in this way. And, although the webs are “silken” and “shining like silver” the tone from the first is ambivalent towards the value they bring to the summer landscape. The “spinners” are “viewless” in the first line: it may be primarily a transferred epithet, implying that the spinners are invisible to the speaker, but there’s a further suggestion that the creatures themselves lack capacity to see and plan.
Jackson moves swiftly to asserting the deceptive quality of the threads, picking up the B rhyme (“air”/“fair”) to close her extended first sentence firmly at line seven with the “sudden snare”. She doesn’t mention spiders: she seems to know that not all webs are spun for the purpose of catching prey but that these other webs, perhaps spun simply to protect the young of a species, can still trap and kill other unsuspecting insects. Jackson evokes a miniature insect world of travel, where a thicket of webs, further entangled by “wayward breezes”, prevents the creatures’ upward and onward flight. They “soar” only to “meet their death upon each summer day”.
The vision is sufficiently forceful for readers to make the connection with the myth of the weaving Fates, and apply it to unpredictability in human life where, as for the insects, there is often “no sign which road doth safest, freest run”. There seems little doubt that Jackson alludes to the harsh and unexpected losses she experienced at a time of personal fulfilment. However, the poem takes the thought further in its late “turn” after line 10. The metaphor of thread-crossing suggests that cause and effect in life are more complicated than they appear, and that easy judgment, like easy trust in the future, needs to be avoided.
Crossed Threads has always tended to understatement: it’s there in the conception itself, of people seen as insect-small and powerless. Now angry indignation hardens the voice, as it challenges easy condemnation of human decisions and failures. In fact, the “moral” frames a large demand not to “any human deed arraign”. This has a biblical undertone (“judge not”) but the requirement is for understanding and not for rules. The understanding, of course, is the difficult part, when the webs are so intricately connected.
Part of a small amount of the surviving correspondence between Jackson and Dickinson is represented here.
